Tesla Job Listing Reveals Push for Fully Autonomous EV

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Tesla has posted a job listing for an Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Controls Engineer, with the goal of creating its own autonomous driving solution.

The role, posted on the automaker’s Careers page, outlines the duties of the engineer as “responsible for developing vehicle-level decision-making and lateral and longitudinal control strategies for Tesla’s effort to pioneer fully automated driving.”

So far, Tesla has been lagging behind in the driver assistance realm. The fully electric Model S lacks features that are increasingly common in luxury vehicles, including adaptive cruise control that uses radar to keep the car a set distance behind another vehicle without driver intervention, lane departure warning, and newly released semi-autonomous driving modes now available from Acura, Infiniti, and Mercedes that keep the vehicle in its lane without the driver having to turn the steering wheel.

The listing is an attempt to bring those features to future products — or even retrofitting them to the Model S — and getting a leg up on the competition from Nissan, Mercedes, and Audi, all of whom have pledged to make fully autonomous driving solutions available as early as 2020.

The job is listed as full-time and based out of Tesla’s headquarters at the Palo Alto Deer Creek office. Applicants are required to have more than five years of experience — or a Ph.D. thesis — in advanced driver assistance systems, along with a familiarity with “sensors such as radar, camera, ultrasonic, and lidar.” But considering the listing is being posted now and vehicle development cycles normally span four or five years, it’s doubtful we’ll see Tesla’s fully automated driving system before the end of the decade.